65th Anniversary of D-Day

I can't git no lower, Willie. Me buttons is in th' way.

Sixty-five years ago today, on 6 June 1944 at 06:30 am British Double Summer Time, Allied troops composed of American, Canadian, Free French, Norwegian, Polish, and United Kingdom soldiers and sailors began the landings associated with the Operation Neptune phase of Operation Overlord, the sea landings designed to free Europe from the Nazi scourge. We know it simply as D-Day. The Army Air Force had begun dropping paratroops behind the lines shortly after midnight on that day, but it is considered that the invasion withe the sea invasion.

For simplicity’s sake, and to make command easier, all the Allied troops were clustered into two Armies, the British Second Army composed of 83,115 troops (61,715 of them British) and the U.S. First Army composed of about 73,000 troops. The Axis order of battle was much more complex, which ended up hurting them during the pre and post invasion period. The Invasion Fleet was drawn from nine different navies and was composed of 6,939 vessels.

The conflict was so intense that, to this day, no one has an exact number of casualties suffered. In this case, casualties means killed, wounded, or missing in action (their bodies were never found). Casualty figures for the Allies were over 10,000 on that day alone. German casualties were anywhere between 4,000 to 9,000 on that day alone. By the time the Battle for Normandy was over the total casualties for both Allies and Axis were around 425,000.

Now, here is something very important for you to remember. At the same time that D-Day was going on, the Americans, Australians, Canadians, Indians, New Zealand, and United Kingdom troops in equally huge numbers were fighting in the Pacific Theater of war. Meanwhile, on the Eastern European front, the war was so intense that it made even D-Day look tame. More people fought and died on the Eastern Front than in all other theaters of World War II combined. Estimates for the number of dead in World War II range around 70,000,000 people with nearly half of them, about 30,000,000 happening on the Eastern front by itself.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that last week I buried a priest who was a World War II Army Air Force veteran. He flew on that day when it must have looked like the Apocalypse had begun, when it must have looked like Satan had won and hell had descended to earth. I am sure there are Russian Orthodox who were at Leningrad who must have thought the same. And, there is a veteran in my congregation who was part of the island hopping campaign. He still will not talk much about that campaign, and I understand and know why.

Let us honor in our minds and hearts today the men and women who were willing to sacrifice everything in order to defend those whom they loved.